It’s fair to say that the UK book market is not exactly groaning under the weight of Mauritian literature, (though it’s there if you know where to look). All the more reason, then, to be excited about this latest release from boutique press Les Fugitives, which publishes French-language female authors previously unavailable in English, and CB Editions. I first came across Eve Out of Her Ruins when considering it for my own press, Tilted Axis, and was blown away by the sensual prose and startling images. I would have loved to publish it, if only we hadn’t committed to doing translations exclusively from Asian languages. Or, if only Devi had chosen to write in Mauritian Creole, or even Bhojpuri; like the majority of Mauritians, she is multilingual, meaning that translator Jeffrey Zuckerman had to grapple with a French using unfamiliar syntax and dotted with Creole phrases.

Eve Out of Her Ruins is polyvocal in more ways than one, with chapters narrated by four teenage protagonists in turn. The blurb describes these as “monologues”, which seems wholly apt: one of Devi and Zuckerman’s greatest triumphs in this book is that each character has their own distinct rhythms, with power and poetry drawn from the cadences of their speech.

The titular Eve “trades” her body with men who she is perfectly aware take but do not give, acquiring in the process something she herself cannot define. Her narration is extraordinary, shifting between describing solid, often sordid details with vivid precision, and soaring into more abstract passages that echo the ebb and flow of the sea that “surges, escapes, shatters” on the island’s shore. The overall effect is vertiginous; it is as though Eve has been unmoored from reality, pulled in contrary directions.

Saadiq, who claims to love her, has similar lyrical flights, inspired by a classroom encounter with the words of his fellow 17-year-old Rimbaud. Yet he oscillates uneasily between time spent alone with Eve or with books, and subsuming himself to the will of his gang, a “moving, powerful, hot body that nothing can stop”. This tension between page and street also finds expression in the copied lines of poetry Saadiq daubs on Eve’s apartment wall, and the insistent refrain that pulses through the nightclub where he watches her dance with her friend Savita: “Baby won’t you give it to me, you know I want it.”

Savita is less sharply drawn, but her tender, protective relationship with Eve offers the latter a space of “calm sunlight” which leaves Saadiq furious but impotent. His obsessive focus on Eve’s body is no match for what Eve herself calls “the poetry of women” – something she finds in quiet moments with Savita, their shared gender freeing them from the politics that mar relationships conducted within “the purview of men”.

Then there is Clelio, another member of Saadiq’s gang, waiting in vain for his older brother to return from France, for someone to guide his life and give it purpose. His importance to the story isn’t revealed until the second half, but all his chapters provide a wonderful textural contrast, their short, punchy sentences strewn with swearwords and broken up by chunks of untranslated Creole.

Threaded through the novel is one further strand, nameless and italicised, whose initial mystery descends into chillingly predictable territory with the all-too-ordinary action of a man removing his belt.

Together these voices provide a stunning immersion in Troumaron, an impoverished area of Port Louis, and in the surges of teenage lust. But these sensory details are more than a mere backdrop: they are an environment where poverty, combined with tropical heat, seems to produce identities still uncomfortably in flux. “Humidity seeps through the walls,” Eve notes, at the same time that she feels she is “the one seeping through”.

Eve’s sense of dislocation from her own body, not uncommon in adolescence, is heightened and confused by its simultaneously being the only bargaining chip she can offer “the sovereign man”. Though she stresses that what her biology teacher “dissected” on a bench in their classroom, after the other pupils had all gone home, was “a human body, nothing more, nothing less”, penetration inevitably brings the threat of contamination, even dissolution.

But the darkness is not unremitting. Just as Savita’s love offers Eve a way out, so do books for Saadiq. “I read as if books could loosen the noose tightening around my throat. I read to understand that there is somewhere else. A dimension where possibilities shimmer.” It could be a manifesto for reading translated fiction, and this stunning short novel is a perfect starting point.

•Eve Out of Her Ruins is published by Les Fugitives/CB Editions. To order a copy for £9.01 (RRP £10.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.